JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE was born at Dartington, in Devonshire, in 1818, his father, the late Venerable R. H. Froude (who died in 1859), being Rector of that parish and Archdeacon of Totnes. He was educated at Westminster, and afterwards at Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated in classical honours in Easter Term, 1840, and was afterwards elected to a Fellowship in Exeter College. He obtained the Chancellor's prize for an English Essay on Political Economy in 1842, and proceeded M.A. in 1843.

Mr. Froude took Deacon's orders in 1844, but having, shortly after leaving the University, entertained views which seemed to him inconsistent with his entering the ministry of the Church of England as a profession, he proceeded no further in that direction.

In 1847 and 1848 Mr. Froude published two works, entitled The Shadows of the Clouds' and 'The Nemesis of Faith;' the latter of which in particular soon became widely read, and drew down on the author the severe censure of his College and of the University; but as this publication has long since been called in, it does not need any further comment. Subsequently, Mr. Froude contributed articles during several years to the Westminster Review' and 'Fraser's Magazine,' chiefly on subjects connected with English history during the reigns of the Tudors.

In 1856 appeared the first and second volumes of the work by which Mr. Froude's rank as an historian will be permanently decided—his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.' Probably no historical work of modern times has attracted greater attention, or elicited from students and critics more decided comments of approval or disapproval.

It is only fair, however, to the historian, to wait till the completion of his work, before an oracular judgment is pronounced on its merits or defects. Dealing as it does with one of the most important and eventful periods of our history, pregnant with the most vital results, a period of religious revolution and political change, the most careful and impartial study is required to banish those prejudices of education and habit of thought from which none can be wholly free. Mr. Froude states that he himself came to the study of this period of our history with a strong bias in favour of the popular opinion of the characters of the leading actors in the drama; but that he rose from that study with many of these preconceived notions either considerably modified or diametrically changed. The early chapters of the work are occupied with a discussion of the vexed question of the condition of the English peasantry during the early period of the reigns of the Tudors, as compared with their position at the present time; and he subsequently draws a most vivid picture of the distress caused in the rural districts by the dissolution of the monasteries. For the truthfulness of the favourable view which Mr. Froude takes of the position of the labourer in the fifteenth century, and of the light in which he regards many of the events of King Henry VIII.'s reign, he depends to a considerable extent on his researches among the Statutes of the Realm, a source of information the trustworthiness of which is strongly impugned by some of his critics.

The third and fourth volumes of the work, published in 1858, bring down the history to the death of King Henry VIII., and we have thus a complete narrative of that eventful reign. No portion of Mr. Froude's history has given rise to greater controversy than the character which he draws of this monarch. While it is incorrect to state (as is implied by some of his critics) that he comes forward as the apologist for the arbitrary acts committed during this reign, he undoubtedly presents the character of the king in a different light from that in which we were accustomed to regard it; and Mr. Froude thus describes his own portraiture:"As it would be affectation to seem to be unconscious that the character of the king as presented in these volumes is something different from that which modern tradition has ascribed to him, so for my own sake I desire to say that I have not advanced any novel paradox or conjectures of my own. The history of the reign of Henry VIII. is a palimpsest in which the original writing can

still be read, and I have endeavoured only to reinstate the judgment upon his motives and his actions which was entertained by all moderate Englishmen in his own and the succeeding generation, which was displaced only by the calumnies of Catholics and antinomian fanatics when the true records were out of sight, and when, in the establishment of a new order of things, the hesitating movements, the inconsistencies and difficulties inevitable in a period of transition, could no longer be understood without an effort." An exceedingly bitter attack on the accuracy of Mr. Froude's delineation of the character of Henry in the Edinburgh Review' for July, 1858, produced the unusual result of a personal reply in the author's own name in Fraser's Magazine' for the following September; and a comparison of these two articles will furnish a good illustration of the two different points of view from which this reign may be regarded. The comments of a reviewer in Fraser's Magazine' on Mr. Froude's history of the reign of Henry VIII., may sum up the general opinion on its merits :"Mr. Froude has produced a most instructive, vigorous, and original narrative of one of the most momentous periods in English annals; a narrative that, whatever may betide his theory, will always be of high authority for its facts."

The fifth and sixth volumes of Mr. Froude's History, which appeared in 1860, included the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. Having in his earlier volumes given the records of the stirring events which accompanied the introduction of Protestantism into England, he now details the causes of the reaction towards Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary. But the greatest personal interest of these volumes centres round the vivid picture which he draws of the character of the Queen; her short and unhappy reign closing in heartbroken despair, religious fanaticism embittering still more her unloving and unloveable nature.

In 1863 were published what would naturally form the seventh and eighth volumes of the History; but which Mr. Froude has preferred to call the first and second volumes of a History of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth'; bringing down the narrative to the rupture with Spain which ended in the attempted invasion of the Armada. In his account of this reign, the historian has been materially assisted by his researches amongst the mass of MSS. relating to the proposed marriage between the Queen and King Philip of Spain, and the subsequent conflict, stored away in the Castle

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